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If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incom

• hooverd 2y ago
  Government works just fine when you let them do things in house instead of going with "we just need to pay one more private contractor". Also pay more.
• moandcompany 2y ago
  Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    and the kindest best of correct)
• therobots927 2y ago
  I actually agree with you but at the same time, being unkind in those situations is only going to hurt yourself. The reality of many workplaces is that the technical aspect as not the main focus. Appearances and politics run the show at most companies. You can either accept that and work with the system or engage counterproductively with your colleagues in a misguided attempt to force them into technical competence (never gonna happen). Eventually I want to find a place to work full of technically competent people. I thought I would find that in my current company because it was so competitive to get a job here. Let’s just say that was not the case. It think it can be very hard for employees to filter on this without knowing someone on the inside.
• rdedev 2y ago
  I don't know if kindness is the right word you have used here. HR is not kind. At the end of the day they don't care about you. But they speak to you nicely. Same for the government too I guess
• spacebanana7 2y ago
  Opposing view - most large scale projects fail because of political and financial reasons rather than technology. Even the bad tech decisions are usually downstream of politics. If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer.
  • Jensson 2y ago
    > If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer. And then it runs 10x over budget due to incompetence. The propaganda specialists creates more issues than they solve, they might solve this issue but they make many other issues not get funded in its place overall increasing incompetence by moving money from competent to incompetent people.
• matt_heimer 2y ago
  I think you could argue that long term lack of kindness at all levels of an organization leads to organizational technical incompetence. It creates hostile work environment where employees don't feel valued which leads to talent attrition. Yes, only valuing kindness with valuing technical competence is not ideal but so is the inverse. You want both.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • zarathustreal 2y ago
    Yea I’d like to see some actual studies on that assertion, it has been the opposite in my experience. Technical competence requires a certain amount of self-discipline and sacrifice. You don’t become competent just by doing the same things over and over, so experience alone is not competence. With self-discipline comes a healthy habit of self-motivation. You don’t need your employer “making you” feel valued, you derive a sense of accomplishment from doing good work. You know you’re valued because you’re literally valued (in dollars).
• bradly 2y ago
  > how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence? Kindness and incompetence are orthogonal. You can be kind and still give honest, direct feedback. And your feedback will probably be received better because of your kindness.
• steveBK123 2y ago
  Actually the most dysfunctional engineering orgs I've worked in had unkind hardos in charge who would yell & scream at people. More of it was because they were poorly emotionally regulated than because they were right in whatever they were yelling or screaming about. Government projects stand apart because things like cost are balanced against the inherent jobs-creation objectives of funding them. Kindness doesn't mean to let incompetent people sit in roles they are incapable of indefinitely. That's more "niceness", using all sorts of HR speak about family/win together/blah blah blah while waiting until the budget cuts come to surprise fire people who were never performing in their role. Kindness is to give people feedback that helps them improve. It is sometimes a poorly socialized engineers impression that people simply do their jobs poorly on purpose. In reality it's a mix of skills and awareness. Eventually everyone gets put into a role they aren't truly capable of and either grows into it or moves on. Feedback helps that happen sooner rather than later.
• citizen_friend 2y ago
  Ive also seen cases where business people truly don’t believe there is an underlying reality to a problem. They evaluate approaches and people purely from a sociability stand point. You make a good point about government, there are so many big problems including bad incentives about working hard, taking risks, etc, it’s hard for to see that as the main one.
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  The biggest problem with government organizations is that they're monopolies. The lack of competition means that (1) if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve.
  • passwordle 2y ago
    >if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve. Source? Ever heard of elections? Sounds like a braindead libertarian software developer take on a topic you have no idea about to me
    • Jensson 2y ago
      Elections replaces the government, not the state. Most people working at the state stays regardless who wins. Elections is like changing the CEO, it doesn't mean replacing the company.
    • BurningFrog 2y ago
      Elections can replace a government. They can't control each of the individual organizations within it. If the Pest Control Section of the Department of Agriculture has a badly run subsection, the single vote of each voter can't independently influence it and the thousands of other organizations within the state.
• sidcool 2y ago
  It's possible to be technically competent and kind. They're not mutually exclusive traits. One doesn't even need to be kind. Just don't be an asshole.
  • globular-toast 2y ago
    The trouble is "asshole" is relative. As an engineer, I value disagreeable people. I want someone to tell me I'm wrong and disagree with me whenever appropriate. But to many HR types just the mere fact you're disagreeing and not blowing smoke up everyone's arse all the time makes you an asshole. People should also feel ok with calling out incompetence which, again, can make you seem like an asshole to some.
    • passwordle 2y ago
      That's what an asshole would say
      • globular-toast 2y ago
        Calling someone an asshole could also be considered being an asshole. See how it works now?
    • toomanyrichies 2y ago
      One can disagree without being disagreeable. “From my experience, this approach will have the following downsides…” is disagreeing. “Only an idiot would suggest that approach” is being disagreeable. Too many engineers take the 2nd approach, and then tell themselves that everyone else is the problem when they get labeled as “disagreeable”. At best, they mean well but are sorely lacking in social skills. At worst, the cruelty is the point, and “I’m just telling it like it is” is their attempt at gaslighting others.
      • globular-toast 2y ago
        I feel like there's a language problem with agreeable/disagreeable and people take the words to mean "nice"/"not nice" primarily. But you'll notice the word "agree" is embedded in there and I didn't say nice/not nice. Perhaps I should have said conformist instead. Basically I'm taking about what PG is talking about here: https://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html https://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
• BeetleB 2y ago
  > If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence? That's like saying a company didn't fail because it ran out of money. It failed because no one was around to operate it. A lack of kindness can lead to mistakes not being rectified, as well as the wrong type of folks doing the work. (Classic case of false dichotomy).
• CM30 2y ago
  And how many would be from incompetence in terms of execution vs poor planning and a lack of knowledge about what's actually needed to complete the project? Feels like the majority of those well-known failures (the 'we spent $5 billion+ and spent 10 years on something that should have taken a few years and maybe a tenth of that budget ones) come from either management who has no idea what they want, planning that hasn't taken into account even half the obstacles the project will need to overcome, or dozens of leaders all trying to make their mark. Actual technical/work incompetence probably plays some part, but it's probably less of a matter of "people weren't honest enough about the quality of other people's work" and more of a matter of "we hired the cheapest possible team to do the work, and they weren't qualified in the slightest". Bonus points for the leader of that team being the nephew/niece/relative of some guy in charge of the project.
  • baazaa 2y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that engineering-values only pertain to things like code-quality. Project management emerged from engineering and it was a lot better when it was done by engineers who embraced engineering-values. If you look at mid-century project management, when it was engineering-based, a lot of the focus was on things like optimising resource inputs, identify the critical path so scheduling could be done to minimise blocking, figuring out approaches to accurately calculate time and money estimates (i.e. making sure estimates were not uniformly biased towards being underestimates as that demonstrates a failure to make empirically-informed predictions). While I totally agree that nowadays most projects fail due to bad management, I'd go further and say they fail because management is HR-values based. None of the above has anything to do with kindness, or indeed social skills in general. Engineers, having systematically deprecated engineering-values, now have their projects managed by non-engineers who go around screwing things up.
• jmull 2y ago
  Incompetence isn’t a root cause though. You have to go deeper… why were the people involved in the project incompetent? If you find a project was held back by infighting, siloed groups, major shifts in direction or key people leaving, kindness will help with all of these things. The reality is, people working as individuals, no matter how competent those individuals are, can only accomplish things within the scope of a single person. There are some things like that, but there are many things that are not. To accomplish any of those things, people need to work together, in a complementary way, toward a common goal. That just won’t happen if they don’t get along. Social competence can become just as important as technical competence. Kindness is part of that.
• dogleash 2y ago
  The article reads like kindness is only a correlated trait to what the author is actually trying to convey. To me this article is the same as any other basic "collaboration" explainer. I guess in cultures where a lot of external and internal pressure is put on exhibiting certain virtues, maybe framing it as kindness can override whatever other goals have made someone forget how to collaborate.
• lemmsjid 2y ago
  Huh! If I reflect back on my involvement in projects that had difficulties, there was rarely a dearth of competent people, and in fact it was often political and communication concerns that led to suffering. Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling. In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs. Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance. I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.
  • Jensson 2y ago
    > not be impeded by political wrangling All that need for political wrangling was created by incompetent kind people. Getting more of those just creates more of those issues, if not at your place its at others, its an arms race.
    • lemmsjid 2y ago
      Personally, I find a team seems to be healthiest if a mixture of personalities are on it. They should all be competent. When it comes to incompetence, people can hide that behind kindness, or behind bluster and bullying. Both are certainly unhealthy. I wouldn’t say one leads to issues over the other.
• doubloon 2y ago
  i would say yes, a lot of things fail from a lack of kindness. Tesla self driving Tesla robotaxi Tesla park summon Tesla cybertruck Tesla solar roof tiles Boring company etc etc One of the main things that Toyota Production System brings to manufacturing is the concept of respect, everything is supposed to be based on respect for each other. Maybe people fall short of that alot of the time, but that is the goal and intrinsic to all their other techinques like genchi genbutsu, kanban, just in time, waste elimination, etc.
• PaulKeeble 2y ago
  I don't think anyone has yet worked out a way to convince people to live in reality and follow science and engineering and also be kind to people who are opposed to those ways of thinking. Being fake kind to people who are genuinely obstructing things getting done is unproductive but so is being unkind and it seems most people value being cordial even if it means things fail. Almost all problems on projects boil down to a people problem in the end many of which are made intractable by company and wider culture.